


Peggy & Howard Tumblr Ficlets

by M_Leigh



Series: SHIELD Founders Fandom Tumblr Fics [3]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-09-12
Updated: 2014-10-29
Packaged: 2018-02-17 01:34:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 7,983
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2292062
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/M_Leigh/pseuds/M_Leigh
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Even later than that his son would talk about how his father had claimed to hate the Hamptons but seemed really to have loved them, have loved the schmoozing and attention, had never really hated the vapidity of the masses as much as he claimed—for it was those very masses upon whom he so effectively worked his charm. His father, Tony would say, sneeringly, was exactly the sort of person the Hamptons were for: glittering, rich, only a façade of a man. Everything about him a lie. But he was wrong.</i>
</p><p>Howard and Peggy go on a trip. Et cetera.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. meet me in montauk

**Author's Note:**

> Various short ficlets from tumblr, collected here to avoid clogging my author page.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Originally on Tumblr [here](http://morgan-leigh.tumblr.com/post/97201495760/meet-me-in-montauk).

Later, he and Maria would spend what he felt was too much time in the Hamptons, although in fact it was not very much time at all, and although in spite of his protestations about disliking the place intensely he by all exterior measures always had a marvelous time: he charmed, he flirted, he drank, he sometimes even danced with a woman or two, if never with his wife. And in the hot baking afternoons when he could not avoid being with his family he lay back in his beach chair under the beating sun with his eyes closed behind his sunglasses and thought about the condition of the universe and all of its interlocking parts and how some of them were always breaking apart and others were joining together. And of course about the ocean, and the sand under his feet, which had been created over the course of millennia, broken apart bit by bit, slammed together once again. And while he thought this Tony, who would at some point later on be given to very similar thought processes, tottered to his feet, trying to stand up in this unstable stand to get his father’s attention, before ultimately giving up and going back to making his sloppy sandcastles by himself.

Even later than that his son would talk about how his father had claimed to hate the Hamptons but seemed really to have loved them, have loved the schmoozing and attention, had never really hated the vapidity of the masses as much as he claimed—for it was those very masses upon whom he so effectively worked his charm. His father, Tony would say, sneeringly, was exactly the sort of person the Hamptons were for: glittering, rich, only a façade of a man. Everything about him a lie. But he was wrong.

He had never taken Maria or Tony out there, out to Montauk; he had not been back himself, in all the years. He was not, in spite of his slickness and his charm and the precise tilt of his eyebrows over a pair of sunglasses, a creature of seasides. But he remembered being out there with her, when they had been young and stupid—he was trained to never think of Peggy as stupid, and certainly she had always been smarter than he was, but he knew later, as a much older man, that they had both, at that age, been stupid—walking in November along the beach under the steel grey sky, the lighthouse in the distance, her hair whipping around her face in the wind, nobody else in sight.

“What did Erskine say he wanted us to do out here, again?” he asked, shoving his hands in his pockets, and looking at her. She was wearing trousers, tucked into boots. She looked like a military woman, which he supposed was what she was, improbably enough. A skirt would have been terrible in this weather. Her scarf was bad enough as it was. He wanted to tuck it into the front of her jacket but he would never have presumed to do so. She would have clawed his face off. He might have enjoyed that, but she would not have, and that would have spoiled it.

“He says we’re to make a study of the lighthouse,” she said, “and survey the surrounding terrain.” She turned to look at it, at the tufts of beach grass and the sand that was snaking through them, unsettled by the wind. “I think it’s a psychological exercise of some kind.”

“Or he just wanted us out of his hair,” he pointed out, and she huffed.

“I’m sure there’s some point to it,” she said, for in her mind there was a reason for everything Erskine asked her to do, and indeed there was in this case, too—but not in the way that she imagined.

It took them too long to get to the lighthouse, meandering and detouring as they did: he finally slipped and fell down into the sand before they were even halfway, and made an undignified noise, and so finally she sat down next to him as he pulled himself upright. The wind was still howling and it was very cold. He could practically hear her teeth chattering. He moved closer to her but did not put his arm around her—that, too, he suspected, might get his face clawed off. But they sat there huddled together looking out at the crashing sea, not saying anything for a while, and the sand that was blowing around left a thin film over the polished leather of their shoes, as though they were a natural part of the landscape.

“Your home, over there,” he said, gesturing vaguely out to the sea, to the Atlantic, beyond which, many thousands of miles away, England lay, in the dark.

“I suppose,” she said.

“When’s the last time you went back?” he asked.

“Three years,” she said, and he whistled.

“Hey,” he said, frowning because he realized he didn’t know. “You live with some other girls, or what?”

She looked at him sideways. “No,” she said. “I have a room to myself. On a, you know. A hallway. It’s a nice building.”

“Oh,” he said. He had lived in palatial apartments, or houses, his entire life. But everybody else at their place of work—such as it was—was a man. And Peggy was very stern with all of them, and they were all very afraid of her, which he presumed was the intended effect. And she did not live with any girl friends. Which left, he supposed, him and Erskine. He would not have trusted most women with what Peggy had to do—this was his automatic thought. But, he supposed, he would not have trusted most people with it, period.

He turned a little to shield her more from the wind, and she huddled into his side.

“You should, you know,” he said. “Make some friends.”

She let out a huff of laughter. “Howard Stark,” she said. “Giving out advice on making friends.”

He let out a little _pfft_ sound and then spluttered when her scarf flew in his face.

“Sorry,” she said, pulling it away. “Anyway. It doesn’t matter now, does it.”

“We aren’t at war yet,” he said, and she looked at him.

“We will be,” she said. “In a month, or a year, or two years. We will be.”

“And you’re waiting for that?” he asked. She looked him straight in the eyes.

“Yes,” she said.

He looked at her for a long moment. “All right,” he said, and turned back to the sea.

“I don’t know if anybody will listen to me,” she said suddenly, and he turned to look down at her, surprised. Her hair was whipping around her face still, and she was chewing on her lip. “Because—you know.”

“You’ll make them,” he said, which he was perfectly confident she was capable of doing. And when they got up not long after that, both shuddering a little from the cold but especially Peggy, he tucked one of his arms around her for just a little as they walked toward the lighthouse, and she let him, neither of them saying anything.

She stepped away from him when they got there, and he knew that he would not be able to do it again. She looked up at it. “It’s huge,” she said.

“Yes,” he said. “It is.”

And so they walked back, ambling along the sand and the grass, and Howard drove them back in his sleek car, which he drove infrequently, away from the town at the tip of the island, which would one day very soon be turned into a military base, and she fell asleep leaning against the glass.

“Well?” Erskine asked when they got back that evening, sandy and windswept, their hair crusted with salt air.

“We saw the lighthouse,” Howard said. “It was enormous.”

“Ah, yes,” Erskine said, and smiled. “It is.”

That was the only time he would ever go there, to Montauk; there was no other time, no other way to suggest it, later. He never told his wife or his son about it, either—for what was there to tell? On one cold autumn day he and a woman he was and was not in love with had gone to the shore and looked at a lighthouse. And then they had come back. And that was all. Nobody, he was sure, but the two of them would understand what it had meant.

And so when, all those years later, Howard Stark died in a car crash coming back from the Hamptons, his son would laugh viciously, bitterly: “He always said he fucking hated the Hamptons,” he would say. “But he was fucking lying.” But if this was not true, then Tony no longer had any way of correcting it—for his father, after all, was gone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am on tumblr [here](http://morgan-leigh.tumblr.com/).


	2. fondue for two

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> On tumblr [here](http://morgan-leigh.tumblr.com/post/97347947745/describe-a-howard-stark-fondue-experience-please).

“Is that—a fondue pot,” Peggy said incredulously, staring at what was in fact a fondue pot balanced precariously over a small but cheerfully flickering fire next to Howard’s tent.

“What would you say if it was?” he asked, tilting his head back to look at her through his lashes.

“I would say, how the—bloody hell did you get a fondue pot and _that much cheese_ out here in the middle of nowhere,” Peggy said, tucking her hands under her armpits. He held out a skewer for her to take and she stared at it for what had to have been a minute before sitting down on the extra little folding seat he’d pitched up next to his in anticipation of this very event.

“I have my ways,” he said, as the cheese bubbled.

“You’re a menace,” she muttered, breath clouding in front of her. “If we get—shelled, and I’m sitting here eating _fondue_ with you—”

“We’re too far back to get shelled,” he said. “It’s Rogers and Barnes and them that are going to be madmen today and run all the way up there.” She didn’t say anything.

“Fortunately your _young man_ has a _superhuman body_ fashioned by yours truly,” he said with a leer, “so I think he’ll probably come out of it all right—”

“Oh, do shut up, Howard,” she said, but she didn’t sound very angry about it, so he figured that was all right.

“Did you bribe somebody?” she asked a moment later, as he was pulling out the bread and ripping it up into little pieces—inelegant, but what could you do.

“Hmm?” he asked, around the skewer in his mouth.

“For the cheese,” she said, gesturing. “And the fondue pot.”

“Oh,” he said. “Well, in a manner of speaking.”

She looked at him expectantly.

“You don’t want to know,” he said, offering her a piece of bread. She did not take it.

“It may have involved a member of the Free French—”

“Oh dear god,” she said, and snatched the bread out of his hand.

“It got you your fondue, didn’t it,” he said, as she skewered it rather violently.

“I suppose so,” she said sourly, and dipped her bread into the cheese.

“How is it?” he asked. She chewed, and swallowed.

“Mr. Stark,” she said. “I don’t think it would be dignified for me to say.”

He stuck a piece on the end of his skewer and stuck it in the pot himself. They had, for some time, eaten nothing but army rations, and occasional tiny bits of precious bars of chocolate, themselves rationed off carefully to last over long periods of time. Even the smell, he thought, of the fondue was better than anything he had eaten in weeks.

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” he said, “I think this is better than the sex,” and Peggy walloped him in the arm.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am on tumblr [here](http://morgan-leigh.tumblr.com/).


	3. The Gardens of the Nations

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Originally on tumblr [here](http://morgan-leigh.tumblr.com/post/98359552040/you-know-he-said-conversationally-for-a-spy).

“You know,” he said conversationally, “for a spy, you are frankly terrible at pretending to be in love with me.”

She stopped surveying the gardens in front of them, where only a few idle tourists were wandering about, exclaiming over small plaques pronouncing the Latin names of plants, and glared up at him.

“We’re having an off day,” she said, and resumed her survey.

“You wound me,” he said, leaning back against a ledge until he was practically in the trees behind him, his hat tossed carelessly next to his hand. “I’m wounded.”

“I’m fairly certain that under that shirt and suit is a man made of titanium,” she said without looking at him. “I don’t think that’s possible.”

“Has _The Wizard of Oz_ taught you nothing?” he asked, appalled, and she turned to give him a withering look. He beat on his chest with one hand, making dramatic thumping noises in his throat. She covered her eyes with her hand.

“Victory,” he said smugly, and sat back farther.

“Someday,” she said dreamily, once she had lowered her hand, looking as cool and collected as ever, “I am going to be in charge of you. I am going to be giving you orders, and you won’t be able to stop me from doing whatever I like.”

“I think we are pretty much at that point already,” he pointed out. “I just don’t listen to you.”

She sighed.

“Come on, Peggy,” he said, patting the ledge next to him. “It’s a beautiful day! A beautiful place! I’m here with a beautiful girl! Time for _l’amour_ , _hein hein_ —” He broke off, snickering, at the look on her face.

“I hope we never get sent to France,” she muttered. “I’m going to have to keep you on a leash.”

“I can do Italian, too,” he offered. “ _Buongiorno_ —”

“ _Stop_ it—” she said, covering his face, but he could see that she was trying to keep herself from smiling, so he did the natural thing and bit the soft flesh of her palm.

“Howard _Stark_!” she hissed, even though they weren’t supposed to be using real names, and snatched it away. “You are—I am going to _murder_ you some day. I can’t—they made me wear a good dress for this, I am—I am wiping this on your jacket,” she said, and proceeded to do so.

“See, you can’t say, ‘How’d you like it if I did that to you,’ because obviously I _would_ ,” he pointed out, and she cuffed him in the back of the head.

“Watch it,” he said, “if we get closer to the edge you could knock me all the way down to my very undignified demise and then where would your pet science project be?”

“As though it isn’t yours, too,” she said, and he hummed to acknowledge that this was true.

They were up in Rockefeller Centre, in the gardens—he thought possibly in Holland, although to be honest he wasn’t certain. His parents had dragged him to their opening a few years before, when he had been an awkward seventeen-year-old prone to standing in corners staring into his drink or surreptitiously (he thought, erroneously) at whatever pretty girl presented herself, all of whom invariably ignored him. So few years had passed and yet what a difference those years made. For one thing, the Gardens of the Nations were not the attraction they had been in 1935, but of course that was not the primary thing on Howard’s mind at the time. He felt so much older than seventeen. It hardly occurred to him that he was still almost painfully young, and it did not occur to him at all that Peggy, who inspired a kind of transcendent awe in him most of the time, was just as young as he was.

Still, it was very nice up there, he thought: away from the mad mechanical grind of the city, with just some strangely arranged plants and the sky and Peggy, along with the distant tourists. Howard was a creature of mad mechanical grinds but occasionally—very occasionally—he enjoyed reminding himself that he was not, in fact, a machine himself, no matter what Peggy seemed to think.

“I wish I knew who we were looking for,” she muttered.

“Peggy,” he said, spreading his hands out on the ledge behind him, sliding one of his arms behind her back, “you are too uptight.”

She turned to look at him.

“Am I,” she said.

He reached over and pulled down his sunglasses with his other hand. “Yes,” he said, and pushed them back up, settling his arm back down behind him.

She didn’t say anything for a minute—perhaps several—and then burst out laughing.

“Howard,” she said. “If you think I’m— _uptight_ , you should have met some—most—of the girls I went to school with.”

“Touché,” he said. “But my point stands.” He tapped at her hip and she sighed before budging over a little, not quite against his side, and folded her arms in front of her.

“I mean,” he continued, “it’s not that I don’t under _stand_. Nobody’d pay any attention to what you said if you weren’t.”

“Of course then you laugh at me when I am, apparently,” she replied.

“Well, I do it out of _love_ ,” he said, and she snorted, in a very un-ladylike fashion.

“You would make a terrible spy,” she said. “You couldn’t be anybody other than yourself to save your life.”

“I think that’s a compliment,” he said. “Is it a compliment?”  
  
“I don’t know,” she said. “I just know it’s true.”

“Do you know,” he said thoughtfully, leaning slightly closer to her, “I’ve worked with you for how long now, and I think I still don’t know the first thing about you.”

She didn’t say anything, just looked down at her arms where they were folded across her stomach.

“I _mean_ ,” he said. “I know _you_. Obviously. But I don’t know what goes on inside your head. And I don’t know anything about anything that happened to you before I met you except that you weren’t rich and went to school with girls, apparently.”

“Well,” she said, still looking down. “I suppose nobody does, do they.”

“How’s that,” he said.

“I mean,” she said, “I suppose I am not as much myself as you are, all of the time.”

He thought about this for a moment.

“That’s bullshit,” he said, and she started. “The other way around, probably.”

She looked at him sideways and then leaned against him properly for the first time all afternoon. They sat there for a long time, just watching the birds and the trees and the carefully groomed flowers, waiting for somebody to come to them, as Erskine had instructed them to: somebody was coming with something important. But they didn’t know what. But they did what Erskine told them to do, even though Peggy was not technically his employee but Colonel Phillips’, and Howard was not anybody’s employee but his own.

“What’ll it be like, do you figure?” he asked eventually. “The war.” For they knew, both of them, that it was coming.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know that I’ll be allowed to go.”

He looked down at her. He was not very much taller than she was but she seemed shorter, the way they were sitting.

“That’s preposterous,” he said, and she shrugged.

“Well, I don’t,” she said pragmatically, but he could see where her fingers were worrying against each other. “Or—women will be involved, I expect. But—I doubt I’ll be allowed to go where I’d… like to.”

“They’ll take you,” he said immediately. “They’d be crazy not to. Who could tell them no? To Phillips? He’s a colonel, for god’s sake.”

“I don’t know what he’ll do,” she said. “He isn’t Erskine.”

Howard thought but did not say that her view of Erskine was perhaps slightly more messianic than was warranted. It was true that Phillips did not seem to feel about her as Erskine did—Erskine, he thought, loved her—but they were both practical men, at heart. They both had objectives. They were not fools.

“He’ll take you,” he said. “We’ll get to go.”

“Oh, you’ll be coming?” she said lightly, but he could tell that it was a real question.

“Of course I’ll be coming,” he scoffed. He slid his hand around her hip and squeezed her to him, and she pushed him away half-heartedly. “Don’t think you’ll be able to get rid of me that easily. You’ll find some nice dumb blond boy from middle America somewhere and I’ll terrorize him and you’ll berate me and eventually you’ll figure out that it’s really _me_ you love—”

“Oh dear god—”

“And we’ll have a salacious liaison in some filthy place,” he leered. “I don’t know, I never actually read any Hemingway.”

“You are foul,” she said.

“I know,” he said cheerfully. “But maybe you _will_ find some Midwestern sap. Can you imagine? What kind of babies would the two of you produce. I can’t begin to fathom.”

“Babies without the propensity to blow things up,” she muttered, and he laughed, loud and clear, and did not notice when she blushed.

“I can’t imagine you with babies anyway,” he said, frowning. “I mean that as a compliment. It’s beyond me.”

“I can’t either,” she said. “So I wouldn’t worry about that just yet.”

“Mr. Greenhouse?” someone said from their right, and they both jumped, having utterly and totally stopped paying attention to their surroundings, and turned to see a small man standing next to them. His rumpled coat and hat both looked too big for them, which had the effect of making him look smaller—even his moustache seemed too large. But he was, Howard thought, a very small man to begin with.

“Yes,” Howard said, taking his sunglasses off. “That’s me. Are you Mr. Pearl?”

“Yes,” the man said, wilting slightly. His German accent was so thick it was almost difficult to understand him. “It is very good to meet you, Mr. Greenhouse. And you, Mrs. Greenhouse.”

“My pleasure,” Peggy said.

The man reached inside of his jacket and rustled around for a moment. He was sweating, even though it was not an exceptionally hot day—although, Howard thought, he was also wearing a coat, and it was not cool enough to warrant that, either, really. Finally he took out a battered envelope and passed it over to him. Howard opened it and peered inside before passing it to Peggy.

“Lovely weather, isn’t it,” he said, and the man nodded eagerly.

“Well,” Peggy said, closing the envelope. “It was very nice to meet you, Mr. Greenhouse.”

“Yes, you also,” he said, raising the brim of his hat a little, to each of them, slightly too enthusiastically. He paused before he left. “You will tell him it is all settled now, yes? It is all settled. Nothing more. Nothing more from me.” His eyes, Howard saw, were bloodshot. “Yes? You will tell him?”

“Yes,” Howard said. “We’ll tell him.”

“Good,” the man said. “Good. I will go now. Good day. Beautiful couple. Good day.” And then he turned and scurried away, through the garden and back toward the elevator that would take him back down to the anonymous maw of the city.

“Well that was bizarre,” Peggy said, frowning. Howard held a hand out, absent-minded, for the envelope, and she handed it over.

He unfolded the pages, leaning back into the trees. He couldn’t entirely make sense of it—the serum was entirely down to Erskine, and it would be a long time yet before it was done, before it was ready—but he knew from what Erskine had explained to them that there were an infinity of parts to it that needed to be carefully fitted together, parts that had not all made it out of Germany with him—some that were lodged in his brain, some that had he had managed to get out in his notebooks, some that he had to recreate or create entirely new, and some—some that he needed to find.

Howard folded the paper up again and put it in the envelope.

“Who was he, do you think?” Peggy asked, and Howard thought of his bloodshot eyes, and his sweat, and thought about Erskine and Phillips, and objectives. Erskine, he thought, was possibly a harder man than Phillips was. He was better, also—Howard believed this; Howard was, in his way, in awe of him, too—but he was harder.

He wondered if he was like them, or if Peggy was, and had not realized it yet. Or if they both were. Or if they would become that way.

“I don’t have any idea,” he said, putting the papers back in the envelope and tucking it into his jacket pocket. He put his sunglasses on and plucked his hat back up from where it was sitting on the ledge, and considered it for a moment before handing it to her. “Want to do the honors?” he asked, and she rolled her eyes. “Come on, now,” he said. “We only have a couple more minutes as a couple, I have to milk this while I can,” and she dropped it on his head with no ceremony whatsoever.

“Hmph,” he said, and straightened it in as debonair a fashion as he could manage while she rolled her eyes. “Shall we?” he asked, offering her his arm, and she sighed, and took it, but neither of them hurried much as they left—in fact they detoured, instead choosing to wander through Holland, and Italy, and England, before finally making their way back onto the dirty noisy streets of New York, which at least for that brief golden time was where they, in their glorious innocent youth, belonged.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Information on the Gardens of the Nations [here](http://www.retronaut.com/2014/05/the-gardens-of-the-nations-rockefeller-centre-new-york/) and [here](http://www.ampleasteroid.com/rockefeller-center-gardens-of-nations-rooftop/).
> 
> As ever, on tumblr [here](http://morgan-leigh.tumblr.com).


	4. in memoriam

When they were young, they had argued, many times, about funerals. The disagreement was predictable: Howard, of course, wanted everyone who had ever met him to show up and pay homage to his greatness; she hadn’t wanted one at all.

“No fun,” he’d said, and she’d raised her brow.

“I wasn’t under the impression that that was the goal,” she’d replied, “of funerals.”

“Selfish,” he’d offered instead, in a moment of rare insight, and she’d just ignored him.

“I’ll probably die in the field anyway,” she’d said, and he’d looked at her with this—expression, in 1939, 1940, 1942—but of course, she hadn’t.

His funeral was about what she would have expected, all those y ears ago. The president showed up, which had the unfortunate effect of sending secret service agents swarming all over the California lawn, and also of sucking all the attention away from the proceedings at hand and onto his own glorious personage. He was not even, Peggy thought privately, a particularly charismatic person, but that never mattered, when you were in the presence of the president. Everyone went a bit mad regardless—even government employees, even at a funeral.

This was not, of course, only Howard’s funeral, but you would never have known it from the guests list—there were of course people present from Maria’s side of the family, all sorts of friends and relations; it was simply that the notable ones were all there for Howard. At least, Peggy thought with a distant sort of fatigue, they hadn’t let the cameras in.

In some ways, it was a miracle that they had both lasted as long as they had—that was what she persisted in telling herself. It was a cold comfort. Howard, even in his latest, sloppiest, ugliest days, was a very alive sort of person, whose existence could not be denied even when that would have been preferable, or more convenient; he was not a person who should be allowed to be dead. Her own death had seemed more fathomable than Howard’s, and that, even at her age, was saying something.

She had hoped, before coming, to remain unobtrusive—she lived an unobtrusive life these days, and so many of the people Howard knew were… unpalatable, or simply exhausting. But it appeared there was no escape: everyone they had one worked with was coming up to her as though she were a widow, offering condolences with that particular expression, in that particular tone of voice, both of which she knew very well, and so she thanked them and smiled—what else was there to do? She felt like a widow, she thought—felt like that for a second time, which was terribly unfair, because she had not chosen it. But it had happened to her, although really it should have been Maria, who had gotten forgotten once again. Although maybe this was better—this small thing—for Peggy thought people would have been coming up to her as though she were a widow whether Maria had survived or not.

Of course, this was nothing compared to what Tony was enduring, across the lawn. Tony was no less an awkward kid than he had been at thirteen, sixteen—you were supposed to grow out of it, Peggy knew, but if Tony ever would, it hadn’t happened yet, and at twenty-one the outlook wasn’t looking positive. But his more typical hyperverbal patter had given way to what looked like hardly any speech at all. His suit fit him poorly in spite of all the money he could easily have paid to have it tailored, and it looked like someone had combed his hair a couple of hours ago to no avail. She thought of what Howard had looked like, at almost exactly that age, both of them young and stupid—he had seemed so slick and polished to her, then, so intimidating at first, before she realized that he was really an idiot. How strange, now, to think that those suits—those 1939 suits—were what she thought were polished. Howard had been twenty-two, then. He had grown up wearing those clothes but he still hadn’t known what he was doing. Nobody did at that age. But he had believed it. That was what had counted. Both of them had believed it. She wasn’t sure about Tony.

He was shaking hand after hand, mechanically pumping them up and down, and from this far away, Peggy couldn’t hear what he was saying, but she could imagine it well enough. Obadiah Stane was standing over his shoulder, leaning forward to speak for him from time to time—more often, Peggy thought, than not—while Tony stared in front of him at something that was not there, something perhaps more interesting than whatever was happening in this unsettlingly pretty cemetery in southern California, a jewel in the autumn sunlight, and Peggy was reminded of his father thinking about nuclear physics—about flying cars—about all sorts of things that had and had not come to pass.

It was, she supposed, a nice ceremony, for a certain value of nice, although the way the chairs were set up under the canopy of trees somehow made the whole thing look more like a wedding than a funeral. Someone had gotten a Catholic priest to come out, so Peggy gathered that Maria, having lost on this front for so many years in life, had finally triumphed in death. People kept turning, not very surreptitiously, to look at the president, who was staunchly not noticing; the secret service men were watching all of them and also everything else; and Peggy was looking at the back of Tony’s head. He didn’t move at all for as long as the priest was speaking, even when heads dropped down across the rows of people in prayer. Peggy looked at all of them, at their bowed white heads, old hair tufted strangely, where they couldn’t see to smooth it down. So many people who had been with Howard back then, in the bomb days, praying now—for what? To be forgiven? She wanted to get up in front of them and explain something to them. Everything that they had done, they had done. But people had trouble really believing this.

“Howard Stark was a pioneer and a patriot,” the priest said, when he spoke about Howard. “It is truly a tragedy that we have lost one of the greatest minds of our age before it was this time to go, but we must remember the richness of a life lived to the fullest. A long and happy marriage to a beautiful and kind woman, Maria, whom we’ll come to in a moment. A brilliant son set to follow in his father’s footsteps. A lifetime’s worth of loyal friends and colleagues—all of you here today. And of course, his invaluable work itself, from his service in the Second World War to the founding and running of SHIELD to Stark Industries. Every man, woman, and child in America has benefited from Howard’s work, and every one of us is safer because of him. We should all be grateful to have lived in Howard’s time—we should all be grateful that Howard lived in our time.”

“Where the hell did they find this guy?” Peggy wanted to say, incredulous, to Howard, who was dead.

After that ordeal was finished, they walked dutifully the short distance to the gravesite, and Peggy lingered at the back, looking at the trees while the pomp and circumstance went on at the front, only sparing a glance up at the back of Tony’s head as he watched the coffins get lowered into the ground. Obadiah was standing next to him, one hand resting on his shoulder, head bald and shining under the afternoon sun. It was autumn in the District, and so it was technically autumn here, too, Peggy supposed, looking back at the trees—but it was not really. It was just Los Angeles, or close enough. She had never liked California. That had been Howard’s business. She sometimes wondered if he had picked it because she hadn’t liked it. An ultimate method of diversion.

She waited, as everybody meandered awkwardly out, muttering to each other and staring openly, now, at the president, who had clapped Tony on the shoulder, shaken his hand firmly, and was now being escorted swiftly off the premises by secret service men. Finally only Maria’s family and Tony and Obadiah were left, so she sighed, and walked forward.

“Mrs. Jones,” Obadiah said, smiling insincerely. She wasn’t certain that he was capable of smiling sincerely. It was an unfortunate flaw, particularly if you were in the business of swindling people out of money, which as far as she could tell was Obadiah’s main occupation. How on earth Howard had managed to get saddled with him, she had no idea—except that of course, she did; Howard had gotten old, and drunk, and sad, and paranoid, and lonely. He had not called her as often, and she had called him hardly at all, and he had gotten sadder and lonelier and more paranoid, and they had both gotten older. And sometimes he had called her very late at night in California, and she would be woken up in the middle of the night in Washington, and blearily climb out of bed, when Gabe was still alive, or just reach over for the phone, once he was dead. Howard had called her frequently, just after Gabe had died. He had known, she thought—that there hadn’t been anybody left.

She could practically hear her sister shrieking— _what on earth do you_ mean _, not anybody left?_ It was not, objectively, true. She loved them—her sister and her niece and the youngest one, Sharon, who was still little, still just a child. But it was still true that after Gabe died there had not been anybody left. Except Howard.

She tried to remember things he had said, phone crackling down the line, at three, four in the morning, when the moon was coming in through the blinds on the tacky wallpaper she and Gabe had never gotten around to redoing once it had gone painfully out of style, though of course she could barely see it, without her glasses. But she couldn’t remember anything specific. She could just remember the feeling of lying in bed, slightly bleary from sleep, listening to him, the drunk slur of his voice, which had made her feel better, and sad, at the same time.

Somehow the way he talked about Obadiah made him seem childish, which had not made sense, since he was so much older—but if Howard had ever been entirely an adult the liquor had pushed him back a considerable distance. But maybe they were all still children. She was ancient, now, and she could still remember standing at the crosswalks in New York, twenty-two years old, with Howard next to her, the wind going through their hair, giddy and stupid with adrenaline, with fear—not of anything specific, just of everything that they knew was going to happen to them. Of secrets. Of having a purpose.

“Hello, Obadiah,” she said.

“Thank you for coming all this way,” he said. His hand was still on Tony’s shoulder.

“I don’t think you need to thank me, Mr. Stane,” she said, and turned to look at Tony, feeling a small sense of petty satisfaction at Obadiah’s not very well-hidden aggravation. “Tony, would you mind taking a walk with me in private?”

“We’re on a tight schedule today, Mrs. Jones,” Obadiah started.

“Ms. Carter,” she corrected, and smiled at him. Tony’s lips twitched.

“Of course,” Obadiah said. “Ms. Carter.”

“I’ll be back in a little,” Tony said, shrugging his way out from under Obadiah’s large hand and scuttling over to her side.

“Marvelous,” she said. “We won’t go far.”

“People will be waiting,” Obadiah said loudly as they turned to start walking. Peggy ignored him until they were far enough away that she thought he probably wouldn’t be able to hear.

“They can probably wait,” she said quietly. “They can all gossip about seeing the president. And I can think of fewer places to be waylaid than your parents’ house.”

Tony snorted. “Yeah,” he said, and stuck out his elbow gracelessly, as Howard had taught him to do long ago, when he was only a little boy. She doubted very much whether he did it for anyone else, but then she was very old by now. They were walking very slowly.

“I’m very sorry, Tony,” she said, and he just let out another little snorting sound.

“Yeah,” he said, and then, “I mean—thank you. For, um—”

“It’s all right,” she said. “I know you’ve had to do that—a hundred times already today, probably.”

“Feels like more,” he muttered.

“But I really am sorry,” she said gently. “It’s an awful thing to have happened.”

He didn’t say anything, just looked at the ground as they kept walking.

“I know,” she continued persistently, “that the two of you did not always—get along very well.”

“No shit,” he muttered, and then looked embarrassed. She glanced at him out of the corner of her eyes.

“Tony,” she said. “I don’t mind whatever it is that you’re thinking, you might as well say it.”

He scowled at the ground. How was it possible, she thought, that he was twenty-one? He seemed sixteen—sixteen at most. His suit seemed to hang even more awkwardly over his shoulders from up close.

“He was an asshole,” he sad finally. “People keep expecting—” He paused again. “It’s not that I don’t—that I don’t _care_ ,” he said, frustrated. “But—I mean, what am I supposed to say, ‘Oh yeah, Dad was father of the year twenty-one years running! An inspiration to me in everything I do! I’m going to miss him every day!’ Like, Jesus.”

She squeezed her fingers into his arm when he looked down, cheeks red. “Might be better,” she said, “but probably not in public.”

“No,” he said, sounding bitter. “Can’t do that.”

“I’m sorry, Tony,” she said. “It’s—it’s all awful. Your father, he wasn’t—” _He wasn’t a bad man_ , she wanted to say—but what was Howard? What had he been? _Macbeth and the Lady_ , they had called them at SHIELD. Even now, she thought, her hands would probably still bleed red. And she had nothing on Howard.

“It wasn’t the same for you,” Tony was saying, not exactly petulant but close. “He loved you more than he loved me.”

“Tony,” she said, but he just said, “Well, he _did_ ,” and she wasn’t sure how to respond—she wasn’t sure, after all, that it wasn’t true.

There was nothing, she thought, more peculiar and inexplicable than children. She, of course, had never had any of her own—but they came along and they were like small uncanny versions of you, or of people you knew, and also not at all—and so you loved them so much, in a helpless way—and yet it was not the same. Even when Tony had been very small, when Howard had still lived in Washington and she had spent an excess of time with him, thereby solidifying Maria’s preexistent hatred of her forever, when she should have been the most vulnerable—when she had felt the strongest maternal pang for him—she had still loved Howard more. And she supposed that did not count, for Tony had never been her son. But he had been the son she might have had, if everything had been just slightly different.

And Howard—who could say about Howard? He was an open book and an enigma wrapped into one. She had never met anybody who was so brilliant and incompetent at keeping secrets at the same time.

“He loved you very much, Tony,” she said, and he made a sound to convey what he thought about _that_ , looking out at the trees, the bright green grass, the gleaming tombstones.

“He used to talk about you all the time,” Peggy told him, which was true. Tony this, Tony that—when he had gotten into MIT Howard had called her, positively gleeful.

“You know,” he’d said thoughtfully, as she’d listened to the ice cubes settle back into the bottom of his glass, “I think that kid may be smarter than I am.”

“Really,” she’d said.

“Really,” he’d agreed. “I think it’s a distinct possibility.”

“And you don’t feel threatened by that?” she’d asked.

“Well, naturally,” he’d replied. “Naturally I feel threatened. But as long as he doesn’t really come into his own until after I’m dead, I think we’ll probably be fine.”

“He once told me he thought you were smarter than he was,” she told Tony, who looked at her with an expression of such disdain she almost laughed at him.

“Right,” he said sarcastically. “And he didn’t feel threatened by that.”

She smiled. “That’s exactly what I said.”

“And he said what, exactly?” Tony asked, trying not to sound interested.

“He said he was proud of you,” Peggy told him. She was a spy. She had always been a good liar.

Tony looked away. “Whatever,” he said tonelessly.

They walked for a while without saying anything. “If you ever want to know anything,” she said, “about—anything, just let me know, Tony. I knew your father for a lot longer than your mother did. And it was—I know he had a lot of problems. I know he was an asshole.” His eyes widened slightly. “Oh, please, I was in the war, Tony, don’t give me that look. I’m just saying—fifty years is a long time to know somebody.”

“Okay,” he said neutrally, and then, a long moment later—“They hardly talked about Mom, like, at _all_.”

She laughed. “Well,” she said. “I suppose, in life as in death, Howard has to be the center of attention.”

Tony made a face. “And what they _did_ say about her—it was all this stuff about how she was—so nice! And—caring!” He looked boggled. “Had that guy ever _met_ her?”

“Possibly not,” she said, smiling broadly. “In fact, it seems likely.”

“I mean—Dad was terrible but Mom was _awful_ ,” Tony said incredulously. “At least Dad actually _did_ the stuff the guy was saying in his stupid speech.”

“Well,” Peggy said. “In a manner of speaking.”

“Yeah,” Tony said, making a face.

They stopped at a bench, and Tony held out his arm to help her sit down, although she didn’t really need it, before sitting down himself. They looked out at the cemetery for a moment.

“When people die,” she said eventually, “they stop being—themselves, anymore. They’re just what people say about them—or think. It can be—very disorienting. Especially with someone like your father.”

But Tony was looking at her like he knew what she was actually thinking.

“Or…” he said.

“Yes,” she said. “Or Captain America.” He flushed.

“Sorry,” he muttered. “Dad just—talked about him a lot. About all of you.”

“I know,” she said. “He missed it.”

“Why?” Tony asked. He seemed so sincerely, woefully confused.

“Believe it or not,” she said, “I think those were the least complicated years of our adult lives.”

He didn’t say anything for a while. “Why didn’t you guys get married?” he asked eventually, picking at the cuff of his sleeve, staring at it quite intently.

“I didn’t want to,” she said.

She watched as he lingered on the edge of saying something, and glanced up at her. “Why?” he asked.

She sighed. “It would have ruined my life,” she said, which was not exactly the answer. The answer was something more ephemeral, more unknowable, unspeakable. She did not know how to tell Tony that it had simply never been an option: Tony who thought he hated his father but who was really just dreaming of a family that was intact.

“Before you moved out here,” she said, looking up at the trees again, “Your father used to have me over every weekend—one day—to play with you. My husband was some kind of saint. I think we only managed to get married because he understood there was going to be another man in my life, so to speak. Anyway—I came over every week—this was when you were very small—and the two of us used to sit with you indoors or on that little lawn, and your mother would stay away, furious, because she hated me—”

“Obviously—” Tony interjected.

“—Which was fair,” Peggy said dutifully. “And neither of us wanted to go anywhere else.”

“He came here, though,” Tony said, mulish. “He—”

“Whatever he was running from, it wasn’t you,” she told him, and sighed. “I’m sorry,” she said, and his head jerked up. “I’m sorry, Tony. I should have—I should have done more. Figured something out. I should have seen you. I should have helped.”

“It wasn’t _your_ job,” Tony said, consternated, which was of course true—but it was not a good truth. It was not a truth that she liked.

“There were a lot of things that were hard for your father,” she said finally. “And for your mother,” she added. “And there will be, for you. But you’ll be all right.”

“Okay,” Tony said.

“You aren’t anything like him,” she told him, and he turned to look at her with wide damp eyes. It was not entirely untrue—Tony now was not like the Howard she had known for what might as well have been her entire life. But, she thought as they walked slowly back toward Obadiah, and the black cars waiting to take them back to Howard’s enormous mansion, and all the people waiting to swarm over Howard’s son, he would become like him—it was inevitable.

Still: somebody needed to lie to the poor kid. And although she was old, now, and retired, and would herself die sometime soon—perhaps, like Howard, in an accident nobody wanted to admit was probably no accident at all—she was still a spy. And there are no better liars than spies.

**Author's Note:**

> You can find me on tumblr [here](http://morgan-leigh.tumblr.com).


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